Advertising is our cultural wallpaper. Emblazoned across our radios, our televisions, our bus shelters, flickering encouragingly in shopping centres, on computer screens, and beckoning us from roadside billboards, advertising wraps around virtually every space in which we go about our lives. Like wallpaper, the bland and mundane ad goes unnoticed, the distasteful or garish offends, but the beautiful or interesting has the potential to augment our aesthetic experience and enhance our sense of engagement with our various environments. A great deal of important scholarly consideration has been directed towards the history of advertising, which has given us rich insights into how it has emerged over the last couple of centuries and a slew of texts have been dedicated to “how to do” advertising, how to integrate it into marketing strategy and how to measure its effectiveness. But less attention has been paid to where advertising currently sits in contemporary consumer culture such that it seems timely to ask questions surrounding what advertising now is (or will potentially become), what role it plays in the digital media landscape and whether we should continue to regard it largely as a largely rhetorical-persuasive, sometimes aesthetically pleasing, communication arm of the market. Equally, there appears a second related gap in our understanding of what the cultural implications of this shift to digital might be for marketers, advertising creatives and media producers in terms of how content is understood and absorbed into the cultural sphere. Only recently has there been an emerging stream of research that attempts to account for how the digital environment is transforming identities and cultural engagement in the marketing context (Belk 2013; Schau and Gilly 2003). Similar questions might also be asked of advertising as we stand on the cusp of seeing how it might transform in the digital environment.
The purpose of this book is to unravel some of these questions and propose some new theoretical developments based on the proposition that advertising, in an age of media convergence where aesthetic, production and stylistic flows cross-pollinate all media forms, can be more usefully thought of as part of a complex system (or assemblage) of content inhabited by multiple actors, influences and techniques. Secondly, because advertising is open to such forces, and indeed operates within such a system, it is therefore prescient to investigate the nature of this system and how consumers as viewers engage with it. Principally, this work seeks to challenge whether classical positionings of advertising as a market-driven, persuasive form of spectacle-based communication continue to resonate at a point in time where media forms are characterised by intersection and hybridity (two terms that will receive greater attention in this chapter), rather than by distinctive genre classifications and how a different theorisation of advertising, based on an assumption of its value as aesthetic and cultural artefact, may yield new insights. The generic distinction between once classical canons such as film, television and advertising (and the theoretical assumptions that drive such canonical distinctions) have come under a degree of pressure in an era where technological innovations across all forms of media production have precipitated marked transformations in how media in its broadest sense is constructed, disseminated and consumed. As some commentators such as Donaton (2004) and Campbell (2013) have pointed out, the generic lines between media forms have increasingly blurred over time. The impact on advertising has been profound, suggesting “a disappearance of the advertisement in its traditional form… and its intensification and hybridization in oblique ways and through new media” (Campbell 2013, p. 142). Likewise, as emergent media channels shape advertising construction and consumption, equally traditional approaches to understanding both the dissemination and uses of advertising content come under increasing scrutiny as their capacity to adequately interpret and theorise new kinds of consumer engagement with advertising is questioned (Taylor 2006).
Our aim in this work, then, is to focus on changes in advertising production and consumption, through such innovations as transmedia platforms and digital culture, and re-evaluate the aesthetic and cultural status of advertising in contemporary consumer culture. Just as technological innovations in previous eras have transformed visual production (Schroeder and Borgerson 2002), the current era of technological innovation has enabled the development of truly convergent media forms and caused new consumer identities to emerge (Schau and Gilly 2003). These changes are an outcome of shifting viewing relationships emerging from the convergence of traditional media (film, television, radio) with new media forms (web and digital technologies, mobile and social media) affecting all aspects of media formats and practice. Multi-platform distribution of commercials on platforms such as television and the web enable distributed approaches to storytelling, nonlinear and clustered arrangements of content (Dena 2004), offering new ways “in” for consumers to experience and engage with advertising not just as persuasive rhetoric but as aesthetically and symbolically meaningful content. Our era of convergence media (Jenkins 2006; Levy 2001), where advertising content is complex, distributed across multiple platforms and engaged by disparate audiences, challenges various traditional understandings of the role advertising has to play both for producers and consumers and animates its purpose as a cultural artefact. Jenkins’ (2006) emphasis on the participatory role of the viewer as consumer is key to understanding both the potential impact of convergence on advertising in contemporary consumer culture and the new ways in which we see our world. Advertising has long been regarded as polysemous (Ritson and Elliot 1999), open to socially contextualised interpretation (Jayasinghe and Ritson 2013) and rich in textual signification (Campbell 2013). Convergent media extends this recognition to develop a new form of “mundane art”/advertising, often emerging out of cinematic techniques, that carries across media channels and engages diverse audiences through its aesthetic appeal. In this context, advertising becomes reflexive-aesthetic media content, similarly designed to entertain and potentially capable of evoking the same emotive experiences as other classical aesthetic forms such as art, cinema and photography.
However, what becomes clear is that advertising is not just affected by technological shifts—that is to say, it is not just the medium that we need to consider. While it is certainly the case that the evolution of distribution platforms has enabled a new wave of creative innovation to keep pace with an increasingly distracted consumer culture, more to the point is what role advertising can now play in consumers’ aesthetic engagement and through what hybridities and intersections such engagement can be cultivated. The observation that lines between media forms are blurring, and that multiple distribution platforms give rise to new approaches, is relevant to the extent that new connections between media forms are being born, fresh forms of consumer engagement are generated and basic assumptions around what has classically defined different media categories are disrupted. Thus, it is not enough to simply consider how the medium affects advertising but rather what new cultural and aesthetic potentialities are made possible, from where such potentialities might arise and what this new media world means for broader considerations of aesthetics and cultural engagement in the age of late modernity. As will be pursued through this work, emergent questions surrounding how we conceive of aesthetics and culture, how we come to understand concepts such as genre, form and structure (across media formats) and how consumers organise their consumptions habits or preferences around media content extend well beyond the simple matter of medium or technological shift.
The main premise explored throughout this text is that classical delineations between different media forms such as film, television, advertising and so forth collapse in the current era of convergence, giving rise to a range of hybrid media forms that need new theoretical ...